The Bible

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. ~ Paul of Tarsus

Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. ~ Paul of Tarsus

You have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. ~ Paul of Tarsus

Then Jehovah’s angel said: “I will greatly multiply your offspring, so that they will be too numerous to count.” Jehovah’s angel added: “Here you are pregnant, and you will give birth to a son, and you must name him Ish′ma·el.

Come, now, and let us set matters straight between us,” says Jehovah. “Though your sins are like scarlet, They will be made as white as snow; Though they are as red as crimson cloth, They will become like wool.

Remember this, and take courage. Take it to heart, you transgressors. Remember the former things of long ago, That I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is no one like me. From the beginning I foretell the outcome, And from long ago the things that have not yet been done. I say, ‘My decision will stand, And I will do whatever I please.’ I am calling a bird of prey from the sunrise, From a distant land the man to carry out my decision. I have spoken, and I will bring it about. I have purposed it, and I will also carry it out.

This is what Jehovah of armies has said, ‘It will be in those days that ten men out of all the languages of the nations will take hold, yes, they will actually take hold of the skirt of a man who is a Jew, saying: “We will go with YOU people, for we have heard [that] God is with YOU people.

The head of that image was of fine gold, its chest and its arms were of silver, its abdomen and its thighs were of copper, its legs were of iron, and its feet were partly of iron and partly of clay. You looked on until a stone was cut out, not by hands, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and of clay and crushed them. At that time the iron, the clay, the copper, the silver, and the gold were, all together, crushed and became like the chaff from the summer threshing floor, and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a large mountain, and it filled the whole earth.

I kept watching until thrones were set in place and the Ancient of Days sat down. His clothing was white like snow, and the hair of his head was like clean wool. His throne was flames of fire; its wheels were a burning fire. A stream of fire was flowing and going out from before him. A thousand thousands kept ministering to him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The Court took its seat, and books were opened.

Do not turn your face away from anyone who is poor, and the face of God will not be turned away from you.

Your strength does not depend on numbers, nor your might on the powerful. But you are the God of the lowly, helper of the oppressed, upholder of the weak, protector of the forsaken, savior of those without hope.

Truth is great, and stronger than all things. The whole earth calls upon truth, and heaven blesses it. All God’s works quake and tremble, and with him there is nothing unrighteous. Wine is unrighteous, the king is unrighteous, women are unrighteous, all human beings are unrighteous, all their works are unrighteous, and all such things. There is no truth in them and in their unrighteousness they will perish. But truth endures and is strong forever, and lives and prevails forever and ever. With it there is no partiality or preference, but it does what is righteous instead of anything that is unrighteous or wicked. Everyone approves its deeds, and there is nothing unrighteous in its judgment. To it belongs the strength and the kingship and the power and the majesty of all the ages. Blessed be the God of truth!

Your strength does not depend on numbers, nor your might on the powerful. But you are the God of the lowly, helper of the oppressed, upholder of the weak, protector of the forsaken, savior of those without hope.

Pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of God, which he purchased with the blood of his own Son. I know that after my going away oppressive wolves will enter in among you and will not treat the flock with tenderness, and from among you yourselves men will rise and speak twisted things to draw away the disciples after themselves.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

The seventh angel blew his trumpet. And there were loud voices in heaven, saying: “The kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will rule as king forever and ever.”

If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain‐moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

In the Old Testament stories, … the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable.

I resolved, therefore, to direct my mind to the Holy Scriptures, that I might see what they were. And behold, I saw something not comprehended by the proud, not disclosed to children, something lowly in the hearing, but sublime in the doing

Now, those four evangelists whose names have gained the most remarkable circulation over the whole world, and whose number has been fixed as four, ...are believed to have written in the order which follows: first Matthew, then Mark, thirdly Luke, lastly John.

Of these four, it is true, only Matthew is reckoned to have written in the Hebrew language; the others in Greek. And however they may appear to have kept each of them a certain order of narration proper to himself, this certainly is not to be taken as if each individual writer chose to write in ignorance of what his predecessor had done.

Saint Augustine, The Harmony of the Gospels, Book 1 chapter 2 paragraph 4. from hypothesis.com

Without the Bible, we would not know of His Church then, nor would we have the fulness of His gospel now. I love the Bible, its teachings, its lessons, and its spirit. I love the Old Testament’s compelling, profound stories and its great prophets testifying of the coming of Christ. I love the New Testament’s apostolic travels and miracles and the letters of Paul. Most of all, I love its eyewitness accounts of the words and the example and the Atonement of our Savior Jesus Christ. I love the perspective and peace that come from reading the Bible.

If the Bible is only human lore, and not divine truth, then we have no real answer to those who say, "Let's pick the best out of all religions and blend it all into Pan-Deism - one world religion with one god made out of many". –

The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post "Thou shalt not steal", "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

An eye for an eye is not a call for revenge, it is an argument for fairness. In the time of the Bible, it was standard to take a life in exchange for an eye. But the Bible said, No, the punishment should fit the crime. Only an eye for an eye, nothing more. It is not vindictive, it is mitigatory.

Too many of our best scholars, themselves indoctrinated from infancy in a religion of one kind or another based upon the Bible, are so locked into the idea of their own god as a supernatural fact – something final, not symbolic of transcendence, but a personage with a character and will of his own – that they are unable to grasp the idea of a worship that is not of the symbol but of its reference, which is of a mystery of much greater age and of more immediate inward reality than the name-and-form of any historical ethnic idea of a deity, whatsoever … and is of a sophistication that makes the sentimentalism of our popular Bible-story theology seem undeveloped. – Joseph Campbell

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be,
except the currency:
not at all; for for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
church on Sunday to attend
serve to keep the world thy friend:
thy parents; that is, all
whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness: let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

The sum of all is, thou shalt love,
If any body, God above:
At any rate shall never labour
More than thyself to love thy neighbour.

That it has pleased God to make Holy Scripture obscure in certain places lest, if it were perfectly clear to all, it might be vulgarized and subjected to disrespect or be so misunderstood by people of limited intelligence as to lead them into error.

Pope Gregory VII, in response to the request made in 1079 by Vratislaus, duke of Bohemia, seeking permission to use Slavonic in local church services. Awake! magazine December 2011, page 7; They Tried to Keep God’s Word From the Masses.

The Bible is stamped with a Specialty of Origin, and an immeasurable distance separates it from all competitors.

Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Masters of Tradition, performed in obscurity their Herculean task of guarding the Biblical Text against loss or variation.

To keep us occupied, he therefore set us to read a chapter of the Bible each day and write a piece on it. The idea was to teach us the beauty of the English language. We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I learned from this exercise was not to begin a sentence with “And.” When I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with “And,” I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible?"

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

It's fair to say that the Bible contains equal amounts of fact, history, and pizza.

Take some time and put the Bible on your summer reading list. Try and stick with it cover to cover. Not because it teaches history; we've shown you it doesn't. Read it because you'll see for yourself what the Bible is all about. It sure isn't great literature. If it were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and some quotable phrases, but there's no plot, no structure, there's a tremendous amount of filler, and the characters are painfully one-dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the Bible for a moral code: it advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition and murder. Read it because: we need more atheists — and nothin' will get you there faster, than readin' the damn Bible.

Reading the Bible is the fast track to atheism. Reading the Bible means starting at "In the beginning..." and throwing it down with disgust at "...the grace of the lord Jesus be with all. Amen." I'm sure there are lots of religious people who've read the Bible from start to finish and kept their faith, but in my self-selected sample, all the people I know who have done that are atheists.

I don't need a Bible to tell me I'm doing wrong a hundred million times in my life. Everything I did wrong in my life I am suffering a long time. It's coming back and back and back and back to me for years. I am not ashamed to tell myself what I am doing wrong, but there must always be a way to understand that's all I can do.

The Bible was very definitely written by men, and not superior men either; far from it! This is why so much of it can be shown to be historically and scientifically dead wrong about damned-near everything back-to-front. We’re talking about people who believe snakes and donkeys can talk, who believe in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft. They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy. We’re talking about people who think that rabbits chew cud, and that bats are birds, and whales are fish, and that π is a round number. These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would bare striped calves. How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics? Obviously the authors of this book didn’t.

But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.

I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That's how you make atheists.

if any person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know. ~ Joseph Smith

While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first chapter and fifth verse, which reads: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. Never did any passage of scripture come with more power to the heart of man than this did at this time to mine. It seemed to enter with great force into every feeling of my heart. I reflected on it again and again, knowing that if any person needed wisdom from God, I did; for how to act I did not know, and unless I could get more wisdom than I then had, I would never know; for the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.

Serendipity: Was there ever a doubt in your mind? He's always referred to as "Him." That's not how I wrote it. But one of the draw backs to being intangible...is that you have no sayin the editorial process. The people that held the pens added their own perspective...and all the pen holders were men. So She became a He. Doesn't stop with God either. The whole book's gender-biased. A woman's responsible for original sin. A woman cuts Samson coif of power. A woman asks for the head of John the Baptist. Read that book again. Women are painted as bigger antagonists than the Egyptians and Romans combined. It stinks.

All the events narrated in Scripture came to pass naturally, and are referred directly to God because Scripture, as we have shown, does not aim at explaining things by their natural causes, but only at narrating what appeals to the popular imagination, and doing so in the manner best calculated to excite wonder, and consequently to impress the minds of the masses with devotion.

Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only narrates them in the order and the style which has most power to move men, and especially uneducated men, to devotion; and therefore it speaks inaccurately of God and of events, seeing that its object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination. If the Bible were to describe the destruction of an empire in the style of political historians, the masses would remain unstirred.

We search the world for truth; we cull
The good, the pure, the beautiful,
From all old flower fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tablets yet unbroken:
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditations.

Psalms. CXIX. 99.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

Psalms. CXIX. 105.

The sweet psalmist of Israel.

II Samuel, XXIII. 1.

Within that awful volume lies
The mystery of mysteries!
Happiest they of human race,
To whom God has granted grace
To read, to fear, to hope, to pray,
To lift the latch, and force the way:
And better had they ne'er been born,
Who read to doubt, or read to scorn.

Quotes reported in James William Norton-Kyshe, The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904), p. 18-19.

I do not know how far I ought to sit here and suffer a gentleman at the bar to bring forward parts of the Bible in this way. It is for you, gentlemen of the jury, to say whether you wish to hear them read.

If the purity of the Bible is to be maintained, it must be by the King, who is the head both of our civil and religious establishments. It is not only his right, but it is his duty, to preserve the purity of the scriptures.

Kissing the Book.Morris: My lords, I except against this Brooke.Court: Sir, he is sworn, and you speak too late.Morris: My lord, I appeal to him whether he be sworn or no.Brooke: Sir, I am not to answer you, but the Court. My lord, I did not kiss the book.Court: Sir, that is no matter, it's but a ceremony.

It is impossible to rightfully govern the world without God and the Bible.

Wrongly attributed to George Washington; while he is known to have made some official statements of public piety, this was not one of them; it is sometimes wrongly cited as having been in various official statements, but the earliest attribution of the remark yet located is one which cites no sources in Upper Room Bulletin, Vol. 7, No. 3 (23 October 1920).